Limbaugh: Pope flap like Fluke

Rush Limbaugh on Thursday blasted the “manufactured controversy” over his comments about Pope Francis, invoking both Sandra Fluke and Martin Bashir as he knocked the media for again making him “an elevated villain.”

Limbaugh told his listeners the uproar over him characterizing the pontiff as a Marxist has been purely concocted by the media and activists who want to drive him off the air. It’s the same situation as when he called Georgetown law student Fluke a “slut” and a “prostitute,” Limbaugh said.

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“This is another manufactured controversy,” Limbaugh said. “I happen to be a villain in this massive soap opera script. I’ll give you the illustration. You remember there was a woman once who testified before a fake congressional committee who demanded $3,000 worth of birth control pills paid for by everybody else. And we calculated that you’d have to be having sex, I mean, 25 times a day, to run through that much birth control [pills].”

Limbaugh said he used a “a word to describe it and I actually did not use the word I meant to use, but I used the word. And you remember for two weeks that is all anybody was talking about. And there were massive efforts to cancel this program and get me thrown off the soap opera, to get me written out of the script. Do you recall that?”

Limbaugh said he used a “joke” and an “inappropriate word” to describe Fluke, and it was then blown up into a completely fake controversy.

“I didn’t even use the word I intended to use because I frankly, I don’t even know if it makes sense to revisit this, the word I did use I thought it meant the same thing as the word,” he said. “The point is, the writers of the soap opera then hopped on it, they didn’t let it go. And I was the scum of the earth.”

Compare this to the treatment of Bashir, who resigned from MSNBC on Wednesday, Limbaugh said.

“Over here, you have Martin Bashir who basically thinks it would be a great thing if somebody defecated and urinated in Sarah Palin’s mouth a number of times,” Limbaugh told his listeners. “And the same people who did everything they could to run me out of town, off the soap opera, didn’t say a word about Bashir. So this business with me and the pope, look, it is what it is.”

Limbaugh said he made the comments about the pope after reading summaries of what the pontiff had said, which the conservative host said were similar to “what you hear your average leftist say.”

“And so now the writers of the soap opera have decided that I have stirred things up enough that I can once again become an elevated villain,” Limbaugh said.

This is just like the Fluke controversy, Limbaugh said.

“I don’t have to explain myself. Everybody knows, just like they did back then, exactly what I meant, they knew exactly what I said,” he said.

“I’m sorry, I’m the mayor of Realville, and I don’t like immersing myself in these contrived, phony, these people acting like they’re so outraged by this,” he added. “They’re not outraged by it. They’re energized by what they think is another opportunity to take me out. They don’t care what I really said about the Pope, that’s not the point of it.”

Meanwhile, also on Thursday, Clear Channel announced it will rebrand two stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco as conservative talk in 2014 and move Limbaugh onto the two respective schedules, which currently feature a number of progressive talkers.